Bitcoin-Style Mining Protocol Ore Halts on Solana – Unchained

Ore might have been the victim of its own success, after becoming one of the most used projects on Solana by transaction count, which in turn could have contributed to the congestion on the network.

Ore, a Bitcoin-like mining project built on Solana, has paused operations to focus on the development of an updated “v2” version of its protocol.

In an update on X, the Ore team noted that there would be no deadline for users to claim rewards, and existing Ore tokens would be upgradeable to the new v2 token once ready.

Mining has been paused effective immediately to focus on the development of v2.

There is no deadline to claim rewards, and all existing Ore tokens will be upgradable into the new v2 token when ready.

For details, please see the full announcement belowhttps://t.co/dwveVDPt19

— Ore (@OreSupply) April 16, 2024

Hardhat Chad, a pseudonymous Ore contributor who appears to have designed the protocol, said that he believed halting operations would be in the best interests of the Solana network, Ore holders, and would be the fastest path towards v2.

“Ore launched just two weeks ago as an experimental hackathon project. Since then, it has grown to become the most used program on Solana by transaction count, and generated a greater peak load of mainnet network traffic than any smart contract in blockchain history,” said Hardhat Chad in a post on X. Solscan lists Ore as the second leading program following Raydium based on transaction count over a seven day period.

Ore’s mining model takes inspiration from Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work mechanism, and lets miners earn a share of one Ore token per minute based on the number of cryptographic puzzles they solve in that time. The Ore supply is on track to reach 21 million coins after 42 years, but there is no cap on its maximum supply.

The popularity of the project, however, added to Solana’s congestion woes, with an uptick in transaction activity from Ore miners further contributing to traffic on the network. 

Solana congestion ain’t funny no more

When will the ORE mining end?

Seems they use the whole bandwidth mfers

— Muro (@MuroCrypto) April 8, 2024

The price of Ore is up 150% over the last 24 hours, with most of the price action coming after news of the project halting. The token was trading at around $268 at the time of writing. Despite Ore’s double-digit surge, it is down 46% from its April 9 all-time high of $502, according to data from CoinGecko.

The lack of a structural incentive to hold the token is one of the reasons that Hardhat Chad sees the need for a revamped version of the protocol to come in the v2 smart contract. The developer said that the new protocol will address inefficiencies in the code and shift away from a vote-based system for making changes to mining difficulty. 

“When these issues have been addressed and we have rebuilt the open source client software for users, mining will resume.I expect this process will take a handful weeks as we implement, test, and audit the changes,” said Hardhat Chad on X.